Awareness key in staying safe during severe weather - OUR OPINION

The nation's meteorologists, we can assume, have a better understanding of the accuracy of their forecasts than the rest of us.

But we and they share a vexing question, especially after catastrophic weather events such as the tornadoes that ripped apart communities in Oklahoma earlier this year.

How much warning of approaching severe weather should meteorologists attempt to provide? How much warning do those in the path want?

The obvious answer is "As much as possible!" But is that the correct one? The more advance warning forecasters provide, the less credible their forecasts will be. If we find enough warnings incredible, we won't act on them - perhaps at our peril.

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We won't take shelter if we're told that our area may face a tornado outbreak the next day or in the next few hours, although we may think about the adequacy of our shelter.

We may take shelter if we're told that a tornado is on the ground a few miles away and headed in our direction.

But along that spectrum of prediction ability, we know that meteorologists are nowhere near being able to tell us that an EF-5 tornado will roar down our block six hours hence.

Meteorologists are well aware that more advance warning is better. "...but the flip side of that is that accuracy and certainty in our predictions usually decrease with lead time," said Greg Carbin, a warning coordinator at the NWS Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

Lead time has clearly improved. In the past five years, residents have been given an average of 13 minutes between the issuance of a tornado warning and sighting one on the ground. In the 1980s, warnings were typically issued 4 minutes after a tornado touched down.

If the issue is important to residents, it's even more so to places housing the more vulnerable such as nursing homes, where taking elderly people to shelter may be an enormous task.

But barring major advances in technology or computational power, the best we can hope for are incremental changes in forecasting ability.

The rest is up to us: Knowing where and how to protect ourselves from severe weather, using television and radio to keep informed and perhaps a better understanding of the science of weather to better understand the limits of predicting it.